Lee Daniels Directed Precious.
As I watched the movie, I was floored by moment-after-moment truth. Real.
Real acting, I mean. The authentic kind. The only kind.
The RARE kind. Rare-st kind. Also, the highest-level kind. Specifically, the kind that makes acting an art form.
It’s the only kind, in my book. Otherwise, it’s not acting. It’s pretending to act.
Let’s Start With The Unlikely Actors And Acting In The Movie Precious
Unlikely, because of the three that I will mention, just this time around, not one of them came by way of being a trained and experienced actor.
Additionally unlikely, because they are, all three, in absolute danger of doing the worst kind of acting of all. Yet they did the opposite.
Let’s start with Mo’Nique. Last night, the director Lee Daniels, called her: “The Queen Of BET” for her Live At The Apollo fame. I am familiar with the onstage Mo’Nique, isn’t everyone?
Mo’Nique is a household name, and a household personality. Her personality is what brings home the fame. She’s notorious for that moxy, the outrageously bold statements, the flirtatious blunt sexual-speak, tactless assessments, and claws-out skinny-girl bashing. Yeah, you’re right, that’s as real as can be.
It’s also a performance. A persona. Many people that have public personas, don’t get out of them. When coaching acting, it’s sometimes hard to get into a person with a persona to not only drop it for the truth of the character they are playing…but, as I’ve said elsewhere in this blog, it’s often hard to get them to be able to understand or decipher the difference. Between their onstage or public persona, and authentic acting. Sometimes, it’s hard to get them to decipher a difference between their real selves and their persona.
Comedy Success Can Sometimes Make Authentic Acting Impossible
Set-up, joke; set-up, joke; set-up, joke, joke, joke.
Two things wrong with that, and that’s just for a start. One is that it’s all ‘external’, done for effect. Polished, over time, for effect. Done for ‘result’. There’s no way to be inside a character, in a ‘private place’, where your emotions can move and flow freely; if you are focused on the metronomic beats of the line, and if you are trying to get a result.
If you are on the outside looking on at your performance, then you are not in it enough to give an authentic performance.
Stand up comics are experienced in getting a laugh. That can be oppositional to being real, in acting. When a result is played for, by the actor; then the audience just watches, instead of experiencing the result for themselves.
This is all a bit complicated. I don’t really want to spend a whole lot of time explaining this now. I have in the past, and will do so in the future. Just know that Mo’Nique should be nominated for an Oscar. She was superb. Not just because she was able to avoid the traps that hinder almost every comedian-turned-actor you can name. But because characterization was wonderful, and her acting was so damn real.
Number Two Actor is Gabourey Sidibe Who Plays The Role Of Precious.
Not an actor. She was not experienced. Start there?
I don’t know how to explain this; except that this actress has an unusually high amount of sensitivity, channeling power, and natural acting ability. She also was a Psych major, and I have always thought there were similarities between the professions of acting, and psychology.
May I please reveal that before I met the director and his leading lady, I had a chip on my shoulder. I assumed that Gabourey Sidibe was just a real person that he had cast because she looked like the Precious that Lee had in mind. That, and since he had also cast Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz, that he really didn’t respect actors at all. Once I saw the film, I was flipped upside down. My strong assumptions, that is.
Last night, I learned that they had, in fact, searched far and wide for a real Precious to play the onscreen Precious. They went across the country. They eventually found more than 400. Precious-Potentials, that is.
The director, Lee Daniels, stated that he lost count after that. They recruited girls from public transportation, from inside different McDonald’s on both coasts. He described something called “Precious Camp”, where some prospectives were put through auditioning levels, and some training. He said they were all very great Preciouses-Plural. The difference between all 400 plus wonderful Precious-castables, and Gabourney (Gabby) Sidibe, wasn’t acting experience.
None of them had any acting experience. (He had auditioned plenty of actresses who did have experience, long before he went on the cross-country search.)
However, they all were very capable. And, in the end, he was sorry to let all of those other ones go.
Because Of Acting.
But, during the very first meeting with Gabby Sidibe; a meeting that, by the way, she really wasn’t interested in going to, and was prodded by a friend who was also going…It was during that first meeting that he knew what she didn’t even know. The director experienced it at a specific moment, that she was an actor.
He described it clearly, and …
Well. I will tell you tomorrow…. [To Be Continued, Manana.]
Best,
;~Dana
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Floored – a moment that takes our breath away. Yes, it is a rare experience. Authenticity is the key to delivering such an extraordinary performance through art and in life. Truth is, the performances that profoundly touch us – in any area of life and work – are produced through BEING not ACTING or ‘fakin’ it until you make it’. In perfect alignment, there is no separation between the performance and the one who is performing. The only moment of opportunity for full expression is in the moment of now. If one is acting, or outside of the role to any extent, the moment of now is lost to the moments before or the moments to come. It is a rare and delightful gift when we, as a consumer of art and commerce, get to experience the powerful impact of authenticity.